When one of the worlds biggest toy companies approaches you to redesign their website, it's a huge honour and we're happy to say we met the challenge with style. The original Bandai home page attempted to highlight several brands at once but was struggling to keep up with the diversification of Bandai's market and the direction they wanted to take their online store. This led to some brands becoming relegated to a spot further down the page, and not able to take up as much space. 

There were some interesting features in the right hand column that the client wanted to retain if possible, such as a featured video are which showed the video of a random brand, a "what's new" panel that automatcially displayed the latest product to be added to the site, and a listing of the top five best selling products of the week.

We decided to change the layout of the homepage from a three-column layout to a two-column layout in order to maximise the size of the main content area. This enabled us to create an interactive hero panel that allows the homepage to show off the top brands one at a time, while giving each brand an equal weighting. Other benefits of the enlarged brand area are that bigger product images can be displayed without the page appearing cluttered.

The features from the right-hand column were then incorporated into the main content area below the new hero panel. In the process of relocating these features we also took the opportunity to tidy them up slightly, modifying their appearance to fit in with the new homepage design and adding interactivity where possible.

The video box for example has been converted from a static box that simply shows videos from a random brand, to an interactive and engaging carousel that allows videos from all brands to be displayed without taking up any more space than it did originally.

This makes the feature much more fun and engaging, making the feature and site much more fun to use and much more appealing for younger visitors to the site.

Within the time allocated for the redesign we also managed to streamline a lot of the underlying code for the page, delivering an improved site at lower bandwidth costs for Bandai, and improved page loading times for visitors.

Bandai were keen to highlight their social media profile, so we also made space on the home page for a 'Tweet feed' that automatically pulls in and displays the latest update from their Twitter account.